If you're giving a speech, your audience's body language can tell you what they like or don't. But in social media, you need to look at different signals for feedback and ideas.
You may know the basics of successful social-media content: valuable, interesting content that your followers will want to read, interact with, and share. Sometimes, however, it’s hard to what you should be writing about.
Maybe you’re still getting a feel of what your customers want – or maybe you’re simply running out of ideas. The good news is, your customers are likely already telling you what your content should be, if you know how to ask and listen.
1. Ask them
Sometimes using a direct approach can yield excellent results. Whether through a multiple-choice poll or asking for feedback via replies and comments, your social media can let you know what they’d love to see more (or less) of, or tell you what they think about recent content you’ve posted. Your followers’ responses might confirm whether you’ve been going down the right path with your social-media content, and may give you ideas to go in a new direction that you hadn’t even previously considered.
2. Monitor engagement
Often, your most popular social-media content is also the content that receives the most interaction. Using built-in analysis from Facebook Insights or various other tools, monitor and track how followers interact with each post or tweet. Comments, “likes” and shares on Facebook, as well as retweets and favorites on Twitter, can indicate what topics and subjects your followers found interesting and valuable.
3. Read comments
The comments that your fans and followers leave on your social media and blog posts can often give insight into the type of content that they enjoy or would like to see. While the overall level of response (or the lack thereof) a post or tweet gets can in itself be an indicator of your followers’ interest in a particular topic, they could also be giving you more direct feedback. Take the time to read through the comments and replies for ones that ask questions, request clarification, or show enthusiasm for a related topic. All of these can give you ideas and inspiration for new subject areas to cover.
Shama Kabani is CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a social media and digital PR firm based in Dallas and servicing clients all over the globe. Her best-selling book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing has just been published in an updated 2nd Edition. Her "Ask Shama" column appears regularly on Upstart Business Journal.
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